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Robert Folger: A.B. Freeman School of Business, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, and
Daniel P. Skarlicki: University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Employee resistance can be a significant deterrent to effective organizational change (Cummings and Worley, 1997). Organizational change can generate skepticism and resistance in employees, making it sometimes difficult or impossible to implement organizational improvements. Although it was once accepted that everyone resists change, we now know that this is incorrect (Kirkpatrick, 1985). How people are treated and how the change is implemented can have considerable influence on employees' resistance to change (Cobb et al., 1995).
Research in organizational justice has shown that when workers see themselves as being treated fairly, they develop attitudes and behaviors required for successful change - even under conditions of adversity and loss (Cobb et al., 1995). In contrast, when organizational decisions and managerial actions are deemed unfair, the affected employees experience feelings of anger, outrage, and a desire for retribution (Bies and Tripp, 1996; Folger, 1993; Greenberg, 1990; Sheppard et al., 1992). Homans (1961) proposed that when the individual is less powerful than the source of the perceived injustice (i.e. the boss or the corporation), attempts to restore justice will be largely indirect. Resisting change is one way for employees to exercise their power to restore the injustice within the existing power relationships (Jermier et al., 1994).
In this article, we focus on resistance to change as a response to the treatment employees receive in the change process. This is not to say that other causes of resistance (e.g. fear of the unknown, low tolerance for uncertainty (Kyle, 1993)) do not matter, or that fairness predicts all types of resistance. For example, other authors (Reichers et al., 1997) have discussed employees' cynicism about organizational change - the loss of faith in the leaders of change and a history of less-than-successful attempts at change. We propose instead that organizational fairness is a psychological mechanism that can mediate employee resistance to change. To that end we focus on resentment-based resistance as a subset of all possible resistance behaviors. Second, we use referent cognitions theory (Folger, 1993) to explain why organizational change not only increases employees' sensitivity to fairness, but also why change is frequently perceived as a loss. Third, we...